Syntactic, semantic and sentiment analysis: The joint effect on automated essay evaluation

Abstract

Manual grading of essays by humans is time-consuming and likely to be susceptible to inconsistencies and inaccuracies. In recent years, an abundance of research has been done to automate essay evaluation processes, yet little has been done to take into consideration the syntax, semantic coherence and sentiments of the essay's text together. Our proposed system incorporates not just the rule-based grammar and surface level coherence check but also includes the semantic similarity of the sentences. We propose to use Graph-based relationships within the essay's content and polarity of opinion expressions. Semantic similarity is determined between each statement of the essay to form these Graph-based spatial relationships and novel features are obtained from it. Our algorithm uses 23 salient features with high predictive power, which is less than the current systems while considering every aspect to cover the dimensions that a human grader focuses on. Fewer features help us get rid of the redundancies of the data so that the predictions are based on more representative features and are robust to noisy data. The prediction of the scores is done with neural networks using the data released by the ASAP competition held by Kaggle. The resulting agreement between human grader's score and the system's prediction is measured using Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK). Our system produces a QWK of 0.793.